The Lure of Crooning Water

Actress Ivy Duke collapses on stage. Her doctor prescribes a rest at Crooning Water Farm, owned by Guy Newall (real-life husband of Miss Ivy) and his wife, Mary Dibley. At first Miss Duke is a pain, treating Newall like a dumb beast, but soon she falls in love with him, and he with her.

The copy I looked at was a very poor one, but between that and the now-hackneyed plot, I didn't think much of this film. Over on the Continent, film was busy reinventing itself to combat the dominance of Hollywood. Within a couple of year,s the British industry would have a downturn from which it never really recovered, while American producers fought back by going to Europe and hiring all the behind-the-screen talent that was available. In the meantime, a lot of English-language productions in 1920 were stodgy in their pacing, and this is one of them. Miss Duke is lovely and a fine film actress in her other surviving, better preserved picture, of the period, FOX FARM, but here she is not shown to advantage. Newall is an inert lump except in flashback sequences, and rather surly in his few titles.

A better copy might yield a more favorable opinion, but when dealing with movies of this age, we are frequently left noting, as Popeye might, that we have what we have, and that's all we can base our assessments on.